Once Upon a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

  “Why you’re acting so weird?” Jonah suggested.

  “No. I’ve been thinking about time travel.” He turned to me. “Do you ever think about time travel, Zoe?”

  “You know, that’s totally weird you just brought that up,” I replied. “Because just yesterday I thought to myself ‘I wonder if there’s a way to travel back in time.’”

  “Really? What a coincidence!” Wayne exclaimed. “Because I was thinking the same thing. And then I thought: you know, I should look up some movies about time travel and see if it gave me some ideas about how to do it.”

  This last part he said really loud, obviously code for “this is what my contact came up with.”

  “That’s all it takes?” I asked doubtfully. “Watching a movie about it?”

  “Apparently so,” Wayne replied.

  It seemed like a long shot, but it wasn’t like I had any better ideas, so I shrugged and made myself comfortable while Wayne clicked on something called Netflix.

  “Back to the Future,” I read. “Hot Tub Time Machine.” From the poster, that looked like the kind of thing that would only be funny if you were really overtired or whacked out on serious amounts of sugar. “Looper. Peggy Sue Got Married. How about this one?” I asked, pointing at something called The Time Traveler’s Wife.

  Nerdy Wayne cringed. “I had a feeling you’d pick that one.”

  “Why?”

  He rolled his eyes. “It looks girly.”

  “Well, I am a girl.”

  “Okay, okay.” He clicked on the computer. “The Time Traveler’s Wife it is.”

  Jonah had pulled his computer out and was trying to work (he was writing an essay for his application to a summer internship at KCRW, a radio station in town), but soon enough he got sucked into the movie and watched with us.

  It was about a librarian with this weird disorder that made him time travel. A cool ability to have, except for the fact that made it close to impossible for him to have a relationship with the woman he loved. I didn’t usually go for super sappy movies, but I found myself wiping my eyes more than a few times. Unfortunately, by the time the movie was over, I wasn’t any closer to knowing how to time travel.

  “Did you just wipe away a tear?” Jonah asked Wayne as the credits rolled.

  “What? No,” he said, wiping away another one.

  “You totally did.”

  “I did not. Why would I cry about some cheesy movie that has absolutely no basis in reality?”

  “Star Wars has no basis in reality, and you love that,” Jonah replied.

  “Well, neither does Harry Potter, but that’s different.”

  Who was this Harry Potter guy? It wasn’t the first time I had heard his name over the last few days.

  As Jonah’s phone rang, I saw Montana’s picture flash on the screen. He grabbed it and stood up. “Be back in a second.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked Nerdy Wayne as I watched Jonah walk outside. Usually I thought guys who wore hats looked lame, but he could definitely rock a fedora. “That’s what your contact had for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  And it had gotten me nowhere. I suddenly wondered whether before breaking up with Brad I should have taken Rhiannon’s suggestion to kiss him. I mean, I knew why I hadn’t—because as much as I wanted to go back to my old life, I was also scared that there’d be some sort of malfunction; or maybe after getting a taste of this popularity thing I wasn’t quite ready to give it up—but now I was left with nothing.

  “So would I be right to assume that at the moment, I’m kind of stuck here?”

  He thought about it. “Yep. I think that would be an accurate assumption.”

  Before we could talk more, Jonah came back in.

  “You going to hang with Montana?” Nerdy Wayne asked.

  “No. She promised her mother she’d help her get ready for her brother’s birthday party.”

  Nerdy Wayne started packing up. “Well, I need to get going. I need to work on my costume for Comic Con.” He looked at me. “I’m going as Deadpool.”

  “Wow. That’s awesome. I love Deadpool. Their last album was awesome.” I hoped that was the right thing to say, but from the looks on the guys’ faces it was not.

  “He’s a character from a comic book,” he said. As he stood up to leave, Jonah and I looked at each other a little panicked.

  “I guess I should get going, too,” I said, making no move whatsoever to get up.

  “Yeah. Me too,” he agreed, also not moving.

  I glanced up at Nerdy Wayne to see his eyebrow go up. “Okay, then. Well, see you guys later,” he said before walking off.

  We stared at the table for a bit while I searched my brain for possible topics of conversation (the weather, music, whether he’d think I was nuts if I told him what was going on). “So. That movie. I kind of liked it,” I finally said. That seemed like a good way into . . . I had no idea what.

  “What’d you like about it?” he asked as he took a bag of trail mix out of his knapsack and put it between us.

  I grabbed a handful without thinking. “I don’t know. The whole person thing I guess.” I glanced at him.

  “Person?”

  “Yeah. You know—your person. Your soul mate.” I looked up from the table. “Do you believe in soul mates?”

  He thought about it as he went to grab some. Yet again we were synchronized in our snacking. Thank God. “I guess. But I don’t think they necessarily have to be romantic.”

  “Totally,” I agreed as I grabbed for more trail mix. “A soul mate can be non-romantic. Like . . . a really good friend.”

  He grabbed after me. “Right. It’s just someone you feel comfortable around.”

  Was he talking about Montana? Probably. “Yeah. Like someone you feel you’ve known forever.”

  “Even if you’ve basically just met them,” he said.

  I felt my face get warm. Okay, then. He was not talking about Montana. This time as I put my hand in, it bumped his. We were both so startled, the nuts went flying all over the floor. Jonah reached into his knapsack and took out a white paper bag and opened it to reveal a black-and-white cookie.

  I smiled. “Is that from Diamond Bakery?”

  He looked surprised. “Yeah. You know that place?”

  “Know it? They’ve got the best—”

  “—black-and-whites in town,” we said in stereo.

  We smiled at each other. “Huh. I wouldn’t have pegged you as a black-and-white kind of girl,” he said. “In fact, I wouldn’t have pegged you as a cookie kind of girl, period.” He placed it in between us. “Feel free to have some.”

  This was good. The subject had been changed. Instead of talking about soul mates, we could stick to safe subjects. Like cookies. Knowing he liked to eat the chocolate part first, I reached for a piece of the white. “So what is the deal with you and Montana?” I blurted.

  This was not talk about cookies. This was me hanging myself.

  He looked confused. “Huh?”

  “I mean . . . you guys spend a lot of time together.”

  He popped a piece of the chocolate part into his mouth and shrugged. “Yeah. She’s my best friend.”

  “So you have no feelings for her whatsoever?”

  “You mean . . . feelings feelings?”

  Were boys really this clueless? “Yes, Jonah. Feelings feelings.”

  He thought about it. “No.”

  I felt relief ripple through my body. But why? Hadn’t I told Montana just a few days ago that they should date? “You know, if you were to have feelings for someone, she’d be a good person to have them for,” I went on, unable to stop myself.

  “Yeah, I know, but we’re just friends. Can we stop talking about this now?”

  “Of course we can,” I replied. “It’s not like it’s any
of my business or anything.”

  “Great,” he said, his face red as he picked up his iPhone and focused on it.

  “But I’m just going to say this one last thing. Which is this.”

  He put down his phone.

  “See, the thing is . . . you just never know what’s going to happen,” I went on. “I mean, you could wake up one morning and find yourself thirty years into the future. And if that happens, you don’t want to feel like ‘I wonder what would have happened if I had done something different back then.’”

  Was I saying this for his benefit . . . or for mine?

  He gave me a weird look. “What’s your fascination with this time travel stuff?”

  I looked at him. It was now or never. I had him alone, and he still had half his coffee drink left, and some cookie (although with my stress level escalating the way it was, that cookie was disappearing pretty quickly), so he was a captive audience. But even more than that, it felt like that by not telling him what was going on, I was lying. I hated lying to Jonah. I wanted him to know everything about me.

  “Okay, I need to tell you something,” I said quietly, “and at first, you’re probably going to think I’m nuts, but you’ve got to hear me out—”

  “Okay. . . .”

  I took a deep breath. “See, I’m Zoe Brenner, but I’m not the Zoe Brenner who’s the most popular girl in school. The one that you—and everyone else—thinks I am. I’m actually from 1986.”

  “What?” he said confused.

  “Yeah. See, I live back in 1986, and I like New Wave music and John Hughes movies and my hair is lopsided—well, asymmetrical—and I’m actually very unpopular—not, like, complete Social Siberia unpopular, but on the fringe of it—and you and I are best friends and—”

  By this time he was leaning back so far I thought he was going to do a backbend. “What are you talking about?! I wasn’t even alive in 1986—”

  “But you were!” I insisted. “I mean, you are!” This stuff was giving me a headache. “And you were you! Except not as well dressed as you are now. And you didn’t wear hats. Oh, and Nerdy Wayne? He was always going on about this thing called Socialize that he was going to invent that would allow people from all over the world to communicate. Which I now realize is exactly like Facebook!”

  “You’re saying Nerdy Wayne had the idea for Facebook.”

  I nodded.

  “No he didn’t, Mark Zuckerberg had the idea. There’s even a movie about the whole thing!” He scrambled to stand up. “I’ve got to go—”

  “Wait!” I cried, grabbing his arm tightly. Wow. There was actually a muscle there. When had that happened? “Just give me five minutes to prove to you that I’m telling the truth. If you don’t believe me after that, you never have to talk to me again.”

  “Right. Because you’ll probably be locked up.”

  I clutched harder. “Please?” I pleaded.

  He stared at me for what felt like an eternity. “I’ll give you three.”

  “I’ll talk fast,” I said. “Your birthday is June twenty-fourth—”

  “That’s right there on my Facebook page—”

  “—your favorite color is purple, but you don’t like to admit it because you feel that purple is a girl color.”

  “I’m in touch enough with my feminine side to admit that I’m a fan,” he said defensively as he broke off another piece from the chocolate side of the cookie.

  I pointed at it. “You always eat the chocolate part of your black-and-whites first, and then the vanilla.”

  “A lot of people eat black-and-whites that way.”

  “Your father’s name is Edward. He’s an orthodontist—”

  “He’s listed on Facebook as my father.” He shook his head. “It’s so embarrassing to have your parents on Facebook. Especially my mother. Everything she writes is in caps with exclamation points.”

  “Her name is Janet,” I went on. “She likes to dress your cat Miranda up in costumes and take pictures of her. Your father has said that if she doesn’t stop doing this he might have to divorce her.”

  “She started a Tumblr for them,” he moaned. “But how’d you know that?” he demanded, freaked-out.

  “Because I was there when he said it, the night your mother made those Waikiki meatballs with the grape jelly.”

  “Those meatballs were disgusting.” His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute—Montana was there that night.”

  “Yeah, because Montana is the new me. Or rather, the 2016 version of me.”

  He looked doubtful.

  “You still don’t believe me.”

  “Of course I don’t believe you!” he yelped. “Because you’re insane!”

  “Fine. I’ll tell you what else I know. I know that your pig-out food of choice would be something in the sweet and salty category, such as Reese’s peanut butter cups or kettle corn, but if forced to choose, you’d choose salty. I know that every time E.T. puts out his finger toward Elliott at the end you start to cry but blame it on allergies. I know that your right pinkie is a millimeter shorter than the other one because you got it stuck in a blender when you were seven.” I could tell from the way he was mouth breathing like he did whenever he got caught up in a particularly dramatic episode of Charlie’s Angels that I was getting somewhere. I took a breath. “I know that while you know you should think that what I’m saying is crazy, there’s a tiny part of you—the part that loves Lord of the Rings and who stops to listen to the guy at the corner of Beverly Drive and Olympic who’s always going on about how the world is going to end when the Mayan calendar does in 2012—”

  “Yeah, well, obviously he was wrong.”

  “—I know that part of you . . . the part that kind of sort of wants to believe in magic . . . might kind of sort of believe me,” I finished.

  Just then we both grabbed for the cookie—him for the chocolate part, me for the vanilla part. “Oh, and we’re synchronized snackers.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe you should go see the guidance counselor or something.”

  I searched his face for something—anything—to let me know that he might change his mind, but there was nothing. “So you still don’t believe me,” I said quietly.

  “How could I?! You’re nuts!” he cried.

  “Right. Okay, well, thanks for listening,” I mumbled as I stood up and started to make my way toward the door. Before I pushed it open, I turned to see if he had followed me, but he was still sitting there.

  They say your worst fears rarely come true, but mine had. I had finally gotten the guts to tell my best friend what was going on, and he thought I was crazy.

  I was really on my own now.

  I HADN’T EVEN MADE IT INSIDE THE BUILDING on Monday morning when it became clear that the news about me and Brad breaking up had traveled faster than paparazzi pictures of Beyoncé in a bathing suit.

  “Omigod, Zoe—I’m so sorry about you and Brad,” said Arden Marshall, one of the biggest mouths in school. “You’re probably in mourning right now, but when you come out of it, I’d love to have you do a guest post about it on my blog.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I pushed the door open and sailed past her. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Zoe. Right on,” Sage Milstein said, holding up her fist for a bump. Sage was the president of the hard-core feminist Fish Don’t Need Bicycles Club. Well, the president, vice president, and secretary because she was also the only member. “Way to put forth the idea that we don’t need guys to complete us.”

  “Right. Exactly,” I said as I bumped her. The good news was that I was so worried about the vote this afternoon about the Ramp that I didn’t care about the fact that people were using the breakup as an opportunity to talk about me and roll around in my misfortune.

  While Andrea wasn’t downright ignoring me, she had taken my suggestion to comfort Brad
very seriously. Like, so seriously that before the assembly I was on my own, without her offering me a pep talk, because she was too busy practically crawling into his lap. Okay. I can do this, I said to myself backstage as I waited for the principal to get everyone quieted down. “And even if the vote doesn’t pass, at least I know I did all I could to try to make things different around here.”

  Finally it was time to go onstage. As I made my way across, I bumped into a metal suit of armor left over from the Drama Club’s King Artie: The Musical! and watched as it came crashing down.

  “Those hours at the gym must really be paying off,” I said as the crowd laughed. I looked at them. “Isn’t that what we all do?” I asked, pointing at the armor. “Walk around with a suit of armor on, giving off different messages to everyone we come into contact with?”

  The laughter died as the crowd got quiet. They looked confused. Castle Heights was not used to such depth so early in the week.

  “Do not disturb. I own this ‘It’ bag, so now you’ll think I’m cool,” I continued. “I’m going to dress like I don’t care what you think of me, but, really, I totally do. If I manage to stay invisible, maybe you’ll just leave me alone and not tease me. Any of that sound familiar?

  No one said a word. By this time you could hear a pin drop.

  “This past week I had the opportunity to hang out with someone completely outside my social circle,” I went on. “Someone who doesn’t sit on the Ramp.” I looked around and caught Montana’s eye. She looked back at me warily, unsure of what I was about to say. “And what I discovered is that while we may look different, and dress different, we’re way more alike than I would have thought. To me, she’s a girl who looks like she has it all together. Someone who, even though she’s not quote-unquote popular, is okay with that and okay with herself and has no use for someone like me in her life. And although none of you will probably believe this, if she hadn’t talked to me first, I would have been too intimidated to reach out to her and try to get to know her.”

  Some buzzing began in the crowd.

  “I would have just stayed in my own little corner of my own little world—on the Ramp—trying to come off as just as together and just as okay with myself, even though I’m about as far as having this life thing figured out as you guys are,” I continued